Lutfullah Muhandis

Lutfullah Muhandis was a seventeenth-century Mughal mathematician, historian and engineer, the second son of the architect Ustad Ahmad Lahori. His fame rests less on his own buildings than on a book: his Diwan-i Muhandis preserves the poems celebrating his father's works, and among them the only explicit attribution of the Taj Mahal to Ahmad that any contemporary text makes. No source consulted gives his birth or death dates; he is fixed by his writings, composed after his father's death in 1649, and by an inscription he left at Mandu in 1659. ^{1 2}

Lutfullah was the second of Ahmad Lahori's three sons; the eldest, Ataullah Rashidi, was likewise an architect and mathematician. His Diwan-i Muhandis discusses the artistic and architectural achievements of his father. In a poem in the Diwan, composed after Ahmad's death and probably not long after 1656, Lutfullah calls his father "the architect of the King" and states that at the orders of "the world-conquering king" he constructed the edifice of the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, and afterwards the fort of Delhi. Shah Jahan's own official histories name only the Taj Mahal's supervisors, Makramat Khan and Mir Abd al-Karim; scholars such as Begley and Desai argue that because the poem's Delhi-fort claim is corroborated by the official chronicle — which names Ustad Ahmad among the Red Fort's chief architects — its tomb claim deserves to be taken seriously, while others hold that the identity of the Taj Mahal's architect is not definitely known. The Diwan was brought to scholarly attention in the 1930s by Sayyid Sulaiman Nadvi and M. A. Chaghtai. ^{1 2}

He was a well-known mathematician, with a practical treatise on geometrical shapes to his credit — the family science: his father was familiar with Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest, and his brother Ataullah wrote mathematical treatises of his own. Lutfullah also practised architecture: he completed projects in Mandu and Peshawar and several commissions for Dara Shikoh, Shah Jahan's eldest son. An inscription he left at Mandu in 1659 again names his father in connection with the imperial works. ^{1 3 2}